© Dynamoo 2004

Domain Names and Party Games

Dynamoo Diary - April 2001

Note: an updated version of this article can be found here.

Well, down here at Dynamoo central we thought it was finally time to migrate our pages from Demon Internet to our own domain, which involved the usual buff-up of the web pages and a complete redesign and rename of the site..

..which was where the fun begins. It turns out, of course, that 99% of all domain names seem to be owned by people who don't know what to do with them. Seethru.co.uk (itself a semi-spoof site) has a fun random word URL generator which proves this fact.

Somewhere in the great dot.com bubble someone clearly thought it would be a good idea to register everything and then try to sell them on at a profit. Now, this is clearly possible if you find yourself in possession of a decent domain name such as America.com which [the now closed] GreatDomains.com has listed at a cool $30 million, but how many people are going to be interesting in paying $100,000 for AmericaC.com? Any takers? Clearly some people are about a million bucks short of being dot.com millionaires and are likely to stay that way (Dynamoo included).

But undeterred by this, many are still trying to flog worthless domain names from eBay to Yahoo! to no great success. 

So where to start registering? Well, you need some inspiration and a bucket load of patience. A broker like GreatDomains or one listed at dmoz are OK if you want to pay over the odds for a decent name. dmoz carries a list of sites that deal purely in unregistered and lapsed domains, but these are usually for speculators only. So your alternative plan is to settle down at a registrar's site and just type in the ideas as they come to you. Dynamoo recommends TotalRegistrations and Dotster as good, inexpensive places to start, but ICANN carries a full list of accredited registrars which you should check out.

But buying the rights to use the domain name are only half the story.. if you actually want to host it then it can get expensive.. but more about that another time!